Government claims CIA cloud case injunction would threaten national security

By Frank Konkel

Oct 23, 2013

The CIA clearly doesn't want to wait any longer for work to begin on the $600 million cloud infrastructure it has tapped Amazon Web Services to build.

Justice Department attorneys, responding to a motion for injunction filed Oct. 10 by IBM after a U.S. Court of Federal Claims judge overturned a previous bid protest decision that went Big Blue's way, provided notice to the court that it had filed classified documents detailing the "harm to the United States" an injunction would cause.

"These documents detail the harm to the United States of an injunction, the current state of the agency's information technology requirements, and the significant challenges that further delay to the procurement at issue would present to the agency," the notice states.

The CIA has been trying for nearly two years to procure a commercially developed cloud infrastructure for the intelligence community.

Meanwhile, the intelligence community has rolled out its own internal cloud computing infrastructure based on the NSA's cloud model. It currently provides data hosting and storage, utility storage and analytics for the all agencies within the IC, though the cloud project currently being battled over in court is expected to greatly enhance the IC's capabilities.

FCW investigated efforts by the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs to improve a joint data repository on military and veteran suicides. Something as impersonal and mundane as incomplete datasets could be exacerbating a national tragedy.